This November, at the TD Convention Center in Greenville, messengers to the 2012 annual meeting of the South Carolina Baptist Convention will consider bylaw changes that, if approved, would codify recommendations adopted last year as part of the report of the Great Commission Resurgence Task Force.
Messengers will be asked to approve changes that will give the CEOs of the institutions greater input in the selection of trustees by way of a mutual-agreement process between the institutions and the convention. Another proposed change would allow for one-fifth of institutional trustees to live outside South Carolina.
The changes were endorsed by the GCR task force as part of a report that was adopted overwhelmingly by messengers in Columbia in November 2011 and calls for significantly reduced funding to the institutions in order to help pay for new global missions and church-planting initiatives.
At the time of the GCR report’s adoption, Jimmy Epting, president of North Greenville University and a member of the GCR task force, told messengers he was “proud” to give up some funding for his institution in order to be part of “an urgency about getting the Word out to the lost” but asked messengers to likewise adopt the recommendations regarding choosing trustees for the institutions.
“We need this,” Epting said of altering the trustee-selection process. “It does allow us to get more funding, to give more scholarships.”
In a Baptist Courier story published prior to last year’s annual meeting, Evans Whitaker, president of Anderson University, said the trustee-selection proposals would give his institution a “fighting chance to not only replace the money we’ll lose from the convention, but to also develop a strong giving and fund-raising capacity on our board that the current process does not adequately facilitate.”
In the same Courier story, Jairy Hunter, president of Charleston Southern University, said the inclusion of Baptists from outside of South Carolina on the school’s board of trustees would be “pivotal” to the university’s ability to “engage non-resident alumni and friends – who can provide significant leadership and financial assistance” for funding scholarships and campus facilities.
Messengers this November will also consider other bylaw alterations or additions, including the adoption of the Baptist Faith and Message 2000 as the convention’s statement of faith; changes to membership guidelines for the Committee on Committees to allow for representation of churches across the spectrum of large and small congregations and to reflect “the ethnic diversity” of the SCBC; and adoption of a statement that similarly calls for ethnic diversity among those elected to serve on standing committees of the SCBC.
Below is the full text of proposed changes, as prepared by the SCBC’s bylaws committee and released by the convention’s communications office. (BOLD = New Text; Strikethrough = Text to be deleted.)
To see how the recommendations fit within the context of the full bylaws document, go to www.scbaptist.org/annualmeeting2012.
